Yingyan Huang

Alumni / Yingyan Huang

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“I’m drawn to projects that involve education and learning,” says Yingyan Huang, who graduated from the BFA Communication Design program in 2009. “I like to take a large amount of data and show it in a way that people can learn and understand more quickly.” Her innovative thesis project, A Single Story, is a circular information map that outlines passages of the New and Old Testaments and shows how different narratives connect to one another. “The life of Christ was recorded in the four gospels of the New Testament, but in the Old Testament there are references that point to these events, which shows that all of these stories, even though they were written over a period of one thousand years, have the same theme,” she explains.

Although Huang says that she is more interested in content than in aesthetics, the Bible map is also stunningly beautiful. The passages of the two books are organized in a color-coded system that spreads out on the page, moving clockwise, like a sun. “Right now, it’s more like a graphic design piece that you can look to for information, says Huang, who would like to develop the project further and make it interactive. “If you rolled over a particular point on the map, the exact passage could show up and explain how it’s interconnected,” she explains further.